ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that theories of action can provide frameworks for criminologicai discourse. The explicit use of action theories as ways of integrating criminological accounts offers one such means of achieving this goal. Radical behavioral approaches have fed into criminology by way of a number of largely unrelated initiatives on the part of both sociologists and psychologists. Social learning theory and radical behaviorism have suffered from their association with differential association theory, preoccupied as it is with the social aspects of delinquent behavior in relation both to its mode of acquisition and to the motives and reinforcements it recognizes. The action theories that have been discussed are often linked to the theoretical accounts with which they have been most closely associated. Thus, the learning theory approaches have often been taken to exemplify the positivist tradition within criminology, while a line of descent for the rational choice approach has been traced from classical and neo-classical criminology.
